Peer to Peer Magazine

39 WWW.ILTANET.ORG The Power of Design for Legal Innovation CASE STUDIES The Value of Design for Innovation The design process is valuable to those wanting to improve legal services because it gives a clear structure to the efforts. You can use the same process to spend a few hours designing something small or spend a year on an in-depth, large-scale project — the process can be adapted for everything from tech-oriented product creation to new organization development. It offers a basic choreography to the otherwise messy and frustrating process of innovation, which is particularly valuable to those who have not been professionally trained in this work. The design process is also easy to use, even for those (like many lawyers) who might consider themselves "non-creative." It brings out creative sparks because the focus of design thinking is on people and human values, centering on being empathetic to people's needs and scouting meaningful comparisons and inspirations. Perhaps the greatest value of the design thinking process is in preventing costly and embarrassing fails. Since continuous testing and iteration is baked into design, it allows for responsiveness and agility in what is created. This agile method is in opposition to the traditional waterfall method of innovation in which a central group creates a definitive master plan for what to develop, spends money and time to implement it and finds out upon release whether people use what they have built. Design-driven processes prevent this waste of resources by integrating users' and experts' voices throughout development and by encouraging a critical eye on prototypes so edits large and small can be made early when prototypes are still cheap and rough. How Design Can Benefit Law We have been using design process at the Legal Design Lab at Stanford Law School over the past three years, and increasing numbers of other legal organizations have as well (for instance, Northeastern's NuLaw Lab, the Department of Justice and law firms like Seyfarth Shaw and Davis Wright Tremaine). Aer running many design workshops and development cycles and doing a great deal of research with law firms and courts, I have identified three main ways we in law can use design for innovation. Design provides a terrific research and development sandbox that allows lawyers to develop promising new concepts for soware, services, organizations and communications that 1 Design Process HOW TO GENERATE NEW SOLUTIONS MARGARET HAGAN Margaret Hagan directs the Legal Design Lab at Stanford, a research and development lab for more accessible, intuitive and engaging legal services. She is a fellow at Stanford Law's Center on the Legal Profession and a lecturer at Stanford Institute of Design (the d.school). She is a lawyer with a JD from Stanford. Read her blog on legal innovation at http://openlawlab.com. What is the landscape? Understand the situation's challenges and stakeholders What is your mission? Define and map the audience and problem you'll be designing for What ideas might work? Generate and prototype possible solutions Are the ideas worthwhile? Test promising prototypes with your users and in live situations How do you move forward? Process feedback, edit prototypes and vet them 1 2 3 4 5 DISCOVER SYNTHESIZE BUILD TEST EVOLVE

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